Indeterminate Oughts

Abstract

Situations where it is indeterminate what an agent morally ought to do pose a Decision Ought Challenge: providing actionable moral guidance when objective obligations are unsettled. Such indeterminacy arises from borderline cases in moral principles, vague non-moral facts invoked by commitments, or structural features such as incommensurable value aggregation. Resolving this challenge involves evaluating three primary theoretical frameworks. First, attempts to reduce moral indeterminacy to quotidian uncertainty fail under standard epistemicism due to the metasemantic stability of moral terms; an ontology of primitive metaphysical indeterminacy best sustains this reduction. Second, nonclassical logic—encompassing truth-value gaps, gluts, and degrees of truth—can sometimes isolate indeterminacy through truth-centric formulations. In residual indeterminate cases, a degree-of-truth (scaling) model proves superior to gap or glut accounts by defining decision permissibility via maximal degrees of objective permissibility, thereby avoiding counterintuitive verdicts when comparing determinate and indeterminate options. Third, within classical supervaluationism, the mind-making model grounds decision permissibility in immunity from neutral sanction. This approach requires agents to adopt binding, arbitrary judgment calls, accurately capturing both rational choice constraints and the psychological angst stemming from procedural unreliability. Together, primitive metaphysical indeterminacy, degree-scaling, and mind-making constitute the most defensible models for guiding action under moral indeterminacy. – AI-generated abstract.